i'm standing on the tracks, you're driving the train
by aletheakatherine
Summary: In a desperate bid to escape the nightmares of her past, Rachel flees to America to start a new life an ocean away. Everything seems to be going perfectly until she wakes up one night screaming, the other side of the bed cold. In the end she's not sure she knows the difference between nightmare and reality anymore - and her new Prince Charming may be the root of all her problems.


"Christ, Rachel," he says, shaking his head.

"I just - I just -" She's shaking. She hates it, how her hands tremble against each other, how clammy she feels, how her mascara's smudged down across her cheekbones and her hair hangs messily around her face. She knows what she looks like. She knows she's an absolute shitshow. There's a reason she's spent the last twenty-four hours avoiding mirrors at all costs, no matter what - avoiding her reflection, too, in darkened shop windows and shiny walls.

"You need to get off this stuff," he says. "There's no excuse."

She presses her hands together tight, laces her fingers together so her knuckles rub against each other uncomfortably, chafing. "The nightmares," she says, except it comes out half as a stutter. "The nightmares, I can't - they keep…" She chokes on her own words, shakes her head. "I can't get _rid_ of them. I just want them to go away."

"Rachel, the alcohol isn't helping."

"Makes me forget…" Scott Hipwell, she thinks. Scott Hipwell. She'd gotten off the alcohol for him and what was the point? He was as much a bastard as the rest of them. It makes her angry, thinking about it, because she doesn't even know who to feel sorry for anymore, because Scott's a bastard and Megan's an absolute fucking whore and Anna, she can't even start on Anna, there's a video of her shouting _fuck you, Anna Boyd!_ at a mirror painted with X's in red, and Tom - she wants to wring Tom's throat, wishes she could kill him a million times over - the only reason she doesn't hate Anna more is because every time she thinks of Anna, there's that image, the distinct memory of Anna twisting the corkscrew deeper and deeper into Tom's ugly neck.

He deserved it, she thinks, and it doesn't matter that she's drunk, because she'll think the same thing once she's sober.

"Rachel -"

"I just want to forget it, you know? Like, all of it. But I can't. It just - it keeps coming back, over and over, it's so _horrible_ -" The last word comes out in a gasp, rough, uneven against her lips and her tongue. She takes another shot of the vodka and it burns on the way down, worse than medicine, but she doesn't care because everything's getting fuzzy and blurry and it's worth it. The world's swaying precariously, around and around, and she feels faintly nauseous. The image of Anna with the corkscrew in Tom's neck seems to waver in and out of focus in her mind's eye. "Don't you ever wonder, don't you think -"

She stops. She doesn't remember how she was planning on finishing that sentence.

"Rachel, you've got to stop. You'll drink yourself dead." He's an American, fucking American, she thinks that back in London nobody ever told her to stop drinking - except Cathy, but Cathy was different, somehow, and why does everything feel so weird?

"Don't you ever think," she starts again, slurring over the words because her tongue feels absolutely huge in her mouth, like an oversized worm that's going to snake and slither its way between her teeth and her lips and out of her head. "Don't you ever think that maybe it'd be nice if, if we could all just...ride a train forever, back and forth, and that's all that mattered, just this one train going back and forth and back and forth like a pendulum, swinging one way and then another, and then -"

"Rachel," Chris says. His voice is higher now, less confident - pleading.

"...and then you, like, nothing matters. And one day the train stops going back and forth and you're going one way, and all those pretty little houses, you know, the fucking houses with their fucking perfect backyards and their beautiful little porches, those whitewashed balconies where the sluts kiss the other man, or maybe it's not another man but another woman, I don't know, anyway - one day the train stops going back and forth and all of the little rows of houses and neighborhoods are a million miles behind you, all of that - that history, the nightmares, all of the stupid shit you've done in the past and -"

"It won't be behind you unless you stop drinking," Chris says. His hand is on top of her hands now, and his eyes are shining, almost like he's about to cry.

"I like drinking," she says, syllables running together, liquid, making one word from three.

"It'll break you."

She smiles, and laughs, and her laugh is dry and ugly and rough, and her mascara's so fucking smeared she looks like a giant panda.

"I'm already broken," she says, as her hand knocks the vodka to the floor.

He carries her to the bedroom and her head's slumped on his shoulder, and she's hardly breathing, but somehow that doesn't seem to matter today.


End file.
